Word: klan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Their frustration was apparent at the Klan rally. There were about 100 people there, including the wives and children who munched hot dogs and sipped cokes while they watched the white-robed menfolk mill around the farm. To an outsider, they were fascinating, evoking both pity and horror; it is difficult to understand the depth of the hatred they nurture. Despite tentative signs of a Klan revival, most of these men seemed to sense, beneath the bravado, that their traditions and their rhetoric are impotent. They quoted the bible, cursed the "niggers," and smiled as the words "racism" and "prejudice...
...Klan's courtesy to me was disquieting. The members were chivalrous Southern gentlemen, trying to guide me over the farm's rough terrain. They allowed me to question Grady and other Klan luminaries from nearby states. I generally got forthright, if predictable, answers. But I was always escorted by one of the squadron of clean-shaven guards, who wore military uniforms, with helmets and pistols. It took me several minutes to notice the cross that they would burn later that night; it was so large that I walked past it several times, thinking that it was a tree...
...band left no similarly traumatic impressions. They were repellant but trivial, farmers and workers in a juvenile boys club, parading around in silly costumes on an isolated farm knowing that people in the city wanted nothing to do with them. It's been a long time since the local Klan made headlines in Winston-Salem. The article I wrote, only a few paragraphs long, was buried deep in the Sunday paper...
Things changed when David Duke came to town a few weeks later. Duke is from a suburb of New Orleans, and is sophisticated, articulate, young and attractive. He is also a very charismatic organizer for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a quasi-rival of Grady's group...
Duke shrewdly focused his energy on teenagers. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Winston-Salem's youths are energetic but idle, racing cars along the strip on weekend nights, looking for a little excitement. The Klan can potentially fill a void in their lives and they in turn can provide badly needed vitality to a dying creed...